The Temple of Artemis(Pre-Event/Intro Thread)

[Magus]

He sighed. It wasn’t meant to be audible, but there was no doubt the bespectacled shill in the suit had heard it. This impudent man began by insulting his appearance and then introducing himself. Crowley. There was something oddly familiar about that name, but he couldn’t place it.

Magus turned toward him, crimson eyes piercing into the dark lenses where Crowley’s eyes should have been. He looked the little man up and down, and what he saw was a man bathed in pretense. A man hiding something – or making up for something.

“Would you…. want to band together, maybe?” the man offered an alliance, without even knowing the wizard’s name. “Not that you have to, of course not. Just. You seem like an alright person and we’ll probably never run into each other again after this, might as well chat for a bit before we die horribly and in pain, yeah?”

Magus sighed again, the gears of his mind turning over as his strategy already began to coalesce, forming something altogether too ethereal to act upon. Still, he would gain nothing through inaction.

“I’m not helping this ‘Teucer’ out of any moral imperative. I’m doing it because it’s a means to an end. Solving his problem presumably means we’re released from this prison, and if I’m the one to do it, I can use his power to get what I need,” Magus replied. Or take his power for myself. “If you understand that and still wish to accompany me, I won’t stop you. Slow me down, I leave you behind. Get in my way, I end you.”

Before Crowley could reply, another newcomer stepped between them. Some would-be knight, clad in garishly ostentatious armor. Magus rolled his eyes as the man spoke to Crowley, and he, too, extended an invitation to an alliance with the shady man in the sunglasses.

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Magus interjected. The armored man shot him an annoyed glance, as though he was the one who had just interrupted the conversation. “The three of us would be more effective working together than against one another,” he swept his eyes across the field of participants. “I don’t need to tell you that there are enough snakes here to end any one of us as soon as the opportunity presents itself. I suggest a triumvirate. Talk amongst yourselves; decide if that is agreeable.”

The mage didn’t wait for a response before breaking away from the other two, but he froze upon seeing a familiar young warrior. He wore light, green armor. Pointed ears poked out from locks of blond hair. He looked… so familiar. What felt like static discharges exploded in his skull when he focused on it. He clenched his eyes shut, his head immediately throbbing with the early onset of a migraine. Something was preventing him from remembering, he knew that, but he let it go.

“Who are you?” he muttered to himself. “And why do I feel as though we were… comrades?”

He turned away, separating himself from the group, though he hoped the green-clad warrior would speak with him. This bizarre sense of familiarity yet not knowing was… unpleasant.

Magus planted his hands on a solid stone handrail, leaning over it with closed eyes as he fought to drown out the world around him. This was shaping up to be a very political machine – alliances and agreements were what was going to win the day – but he was tired.

Perhaps they would come to him. Perhaps he could triumph on his own. Perhaps he’d simply slaughter the lot of them and damn Teucer the way Omni had damned him.